Okay, it’s less than a week since my last entry. That still counts. All I have really done up until Monday was work for the Army at the Reserve Center and at a conference in Little Rock. Did not do anything useful except for making the extra money needed to hold things down while we are waiting for the house to sell. So, I will skip to Monday.
We left for the camp early and arrived just after 0900 because we got some food and some cubes and horse feed. Dad had come in the night before because Grandmother had not seen the horses in a while. They were fine, just running with the wild bunch. We will have to go back to segregating the horses from the rest of the herd. That will also keep the cows away from the highway. Dad had driven by the place a couple of times, but made a point not to look at it as he knew we would want to give him the tour. I appreciate that. He helped us unload some of the boxes that we had brought up and we gave him the tour. It was fun. He was very impressed with the size of the home and the views we had selected.
We saddled up and Anna rode the 4-wheeler with some cubes. We did not do very good cowboying. We were going to use the 4-wheeler to toll them up, but we did not get out there soon enough with the vehicle. Once the cows saw mounted riders, they were skittish. Once that happened we should have worked them like cowboys. Instead, we faded back into Bobcat Woods and hoped they would follow. They kind of did, but we never bunched them up. Rebel and I had a great ride chasing down a pair. They got south of me and started to head through Bobcat Woods back out to the Savannah, away from the pens. It was thick enough that we couldn’t get ahead of them, but we stayed with them until they hit open ground, then Rebel poured on some speed and we got around them. I wore Rebel out and that is not easy to do. There were a lot of down trees so we got to practice our jumping a little bit. I lost my hat, but found it later. It reminded me of why I love this stuff so much.
It has been a long time since we went out to pen cows, but did not get anything. Fortunately, there had been some up close to the pens the night before when Dad was looking for the horses so he got them in. There were about 8 calves in there. If they weren’t there, we probably would have gone back and penned what we lost, but we had plenty to work so we got to it.
What we failed at in rounding them up, we made up in cutting. We cut the cows out in about 5 minutes. They just all wanted to go. The calves were a little harder to work, but we got them all in. Anna was “Johnny on the spot” with the gate for the trailer. The more we do the more of a hand she becomes. I’m very proud of her.
We hauled them off to Raywood and ate lunch there. We also watched the sale a little bit. I will start going to the sale more often to try to find some good replacement cows. The calves we brought to the sale were absolutely beautiful. They were all the same size, color, etc. If we had forty of them we could have sold them as a bunch. However, we only have about 20. Once again, I will start tagging them as soon as I can to see if I can figure out where the problem is.
Anna did some more painting in the afternoon.
Yesterday, was my day off. Today, I did the yard. I even got up and ran. Now it’s just admin stuff.
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